Plenty of clouds, but a silver lining

16.12.2011

Milan/Turku – Italian drug developer Newron SpA has had a roller-coaster ride in the last few months. First Merck Serono decided to drop its stake in the company’s Parkinson’s Disease candidate salfinamide, and returned the rights in late October. Then a few days later, Biotie called off its cross-Europe wedding with the Milanese hopeful. Without a potential pay-off from salfin­amide, Newron simply was not worth enough for the Finns. But after all the setbacks, Newron’s executives are now feeling cautiously optimistic again. The company has received unsolicited approaches from a number of pharmaceutical companies regarding licensing the compound or even getting on track for a M&A transaction. “We are very pleased with the interest expressed by a significant number of companies,” said Newron CEO Luca Benatti in a statement. “We are confident of closing a deal in the near future.”

Rome/Milan – Together with two Italian research institutes, British drug giant Glaxo­SmithKline has begun to develop a therapy for the heriditary immune defect ADA-SCID, which affects only 350 children worldwide. Fondazione...

Rome – When it comes to GMOs, the gap between Italy’s federal government and its regions that has marked the country for years is rapidly widening into a gulf. The latest rupture was on display at the October session of the...

Valletta – A new Life Sciences Park is to be created on the outskirts of Malta’s capital Valletta. The EUR20m project will provide space for companies operating in biotechnology and medical sciences. The park will be located in...

Verona – Scientists at Glaxo­SmithKline in Verona have discovered that specific neurons in the amygdala control how mice react to fear stimuli. When they switched off the so-called Type I cells in the animals’ amyg­dala, the mice...

San Michele all’Adige – The genetic code of the Golden Delicious apple has been deciphered. Led by Riccardo Velasco at the Edmund Mach Foundation in San Michele all’Adige in Italy’s Trentino province, a team of scientists from 20...

Rome/Sydney – A novel therapy based on Yttrium-90-loaded beads has been shown to be safe and effective in patients with inoperable colorectal cancer liver metastases (British Journal of Cancer 103: 324-331) in a phase II trial...

: It’s hard to be a pro-GMO campaigner in Italy. Since 2001, the regions there have not implemented the plans for coexistence that were suggested by a ministerial decree. Instead, there was a de facto Italian moratorium on GM...

Milan – One of Italy’s biggest biotech players wants to raise EUR58m to boost its pipeline of cancer therapies. The round will be closed on July 16th. With operating costs of EUR22.5m and a total loss of about EUR17m in 2009,...

Milan – Italian researchers have restored sight to blind patients using stem cells from the patients’ own bodies. In a study published by the New England Journal of Medicine (10.1056/NEJMoa0905955), scientists from Modena and...

Rome/Maryland – The Vatican has taken a bold step into unchartered territory with its decision to finance new research into the potential use of adult stem cells for the treatment of intestinal disease and possibly other...

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